Hillary's Secret War: Author Intro by Richard Poe

RichardPoe.com ^ | March 10, 2004 | Richard Poe

[Richard Poe]

Hillary's Secret War The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists by Richard Poe Foreword by Jim Robinson Founder of FreeRepublic.com

 

Author’s Introduction
by Richard Poe

 

MANY readers will dismiss this book as a collection of wild-eyed conspiracy theories. Yet strong evidence supports every allegation.

Who can deny any longer that Hillary Clinton presided over a "secret police" force, charged with silencing, bribing, blackmailing, intimidating, and otherwise neutralizing Clinton foes? The evidence is frankly overwhelming. "Hillary is not merely an aider and abettor to this secret police operation. She has been its prime instigator and organizer," wrote the late Barbara Olson in 1999.1 Mrs. Olson was in a position to know. A former federal prosecutor, she served as chief investigative counsel for the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, which probed Hillary’s role in the Travelgate and Filegate scandals in 1995 and 1996.

It is my contention, in this book, that Hillary used her secret police to wage war on the Internet. Her operatives engaged in a massive, covert, long-running, and illegal campaign to silence dissident voices on the World Wide Web.

How did Hillary manage to escape punishment for such blatant abuse of power? Simple. She followed the same strategy that got her off the hook for every other crime of which she was ever accused. Hillary’s attack machine bullied, blackmailed, terrorized, and intimidated every serious investigator, from journalists to federal prosecutors and independent counsels, until they simply gave up. In many cases, Hillary’s operatives carried out these attacks openly and in full sight of major media. No one blew the whistle. No one cried foul. No one stopped her.

Consider the words of former White House spokesman George Stephanopoulos in a February 8, 1998 interview on ABC's This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. With pressure mounting to impeach Bill Clinton, Stephanopoulos blandly dropped this bombshell:

George Stephanopoulos: White House allies are already starting to whisper about what I'll call the Ellen Rometsch strategy . . . She was a girlfriend of John F. Kennedy, who also happened to be an East German spy. And Robert Kennedy was charged with getting her out of the country and also getting John Edgar Hoover to go to the Congress and say, don't you investigate this, because if you do, we're going to open up everybody's closets. . . .

Sam Donaldson: Are you suggesting for a moment that what they're beginning to say is that if you investigate this too much, we'll put all your dirty linen right on the table? Every member of the Senate? Every member of the press corp?

Stephanopoulos: Absolutely. The president said he would never resign, and I think some around him are willing to take everybody down with him.

At the time he gave this interview, Stephanopoulos was an ABC News analyst, having resigned as White House communications chief in 1996. He was thus able to pose as an impartial journalist, innocently "reporting" what his White House sources told him. Behind the mask of objectivity, however, Stephanopoulos was still doing the Clintons’ dirty work, using his platform as an ABC analyst to deliver the Clintons’ threat.

Stephanopoulos had just announced on national television that the White House was prepared to unleash an "Ellen Rometsch"-style bloodbath. He thus put "every member of the Senate" and "every member of the press corp" on notice that their personal "dirty linen" would be exposed should they investigate the Clintons too aggressively. This was no idle threat. Under Hillary’s direction, White House operatives illegally commandeered over a thousand secret FBI background files on Washington movers and shakers. Moreover, Hillary retained detective firms such as Terry Lenzner’s Investigative Group International (IGI) to dig up dirt on White House enemies. On February 12, 1999, the Webzine Capitol Hill Blue reported:

Despite official denials, the Clinton White House has collected new dossiers, complete with financial records, FBI investigative information and IRS reports on House impeachment managers and other perceived enemies of the administration. . . . "I’ve seen FBI and IRS files on members of Congress, complete dossiers on reporters and more," one worried aide admitted. "This is really scary."

And so the Clintons got off the hook . . . not once, but many times. That the Clintons ruled by fear—and that fear alone kept them in office—has long been an open secret in Washington. When Richard Nixon stepped down in 1974, many newscasters exclaimed, "The system works!" But "the system"—which is to say the separation of powers set up by our Founding Fathers—most certainly did not work in the case of Bill and Hillary Clinton. It remains to be seen whether America’s constitutional balance can be restored. As the Romans learned from the usurpations of Julius Caesar, senators who surrender their power rarely manage to regain it.

Conspiracy Theories

"We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth . . .," said Patrick Henry on March 23, 1775. "For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it."

We who live and work in the New Underground try our best to honor Patrick Henry’s creed. By the New Underground, I mean the growing network of dissident journalists on cable TV, talk radio, and the Internet. In the course of our labors, we stumble, now and then, upon what Patrick Henry might have called "painful truths." Readers will find many such truths in this book.

In December 1996, the cable network Nickelodeon held a Christmas party for the producers of Ka-Blam!, its new hit animated series. As line producer of the series, my wife, Marie, attended and found herself sitting next to the husband of one of Ka-Blam!’s producers. He happened to be a producer himself, for CBS’s 60 Minutes. Their conversation turned to the Internet.

I had just that year put up my first Web page—one of the freebie sites that AOL then offered its members. The project swallowed up most of my time, energy, and attention, at the expense of my writing deadlines and family life. Seeing her husband thus mesmerized by the Internet, Marie grew curious about the phenomenon herself.

"Do you think the Internet will ever replace 60 Minutes?" she asked her table partner.

The man seemed shocked. "Replace 60 Minutes?" he said. "No, no, of course not. It will never replace television." He confided, however, that he employed two full-time assistants whose sole occupation was to surf the Internet looking for stories.

"Really!" said my wife. "And do you find good stories there?"

The man made a face. "Ninety percent of the stories on the Internet are bogus, no reporting behind them. There’s a lot of conspiracy theories in there."

"Oh," said Marie. "But some of them turn out to be true, don’t they?"

The man shot her a look. "Yes, some of them."

"And you use them?"

"Sometimes."

At that point, the man grew uncomfortable, as if he had revealed too much. He turned away and began talking to someone else.

That snippet of conversation stuck in my mind. It showed that as early as 1996, the Internet already offered so much unique information about current events that Big Media news producers were tapping it on a regular and systematic basis.

But what exactly is a conspiracy theory? Mainstream journalists tend to use this phrase to dismiss any explanation for an event which differs from the official explanation. Thus, if an Internet reporter suggests that Bill Clinton traded nuclear secrets for Chinese campaign cash, that is a conspiracy theory—even if it happens to be true. However, if Hillary Clinton charges that her husband is being hounded by a "vast, right-wing conspiracy," her accusation is treated seriously. Why? Because the first charge was denied by official sources, while the second was generated by an official source.

Mainstream reporters’ aversion to what they call conspiracy theories—that is, to stories which official sources have denied—certainly helps explain why Big Media has become so boring, irrelevant, and inaccurate. Any journalist who blindly accepts the official explanation for things is bound to be wrong most of the time about virtually everything.

History’s keenest minds have always encouraged a more skeptical approach. "Never believe in anything until it has been officially denied," warned Germany’s "Iron Chancellor" Otto von Bismarck.

We of the New Underground try to think as little as possible like Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw, and as much as possible like Otto von Bismarck. Because we are free to think critically, we gain a clearer picture, in some ways, than many Big Media reporters. That is why, as early as 1996, 60 Minutes producers and other mainstream news hounds were coming to us for stories.

The Brokaw Principle

In the summer of 2000, I participated in a panel discussion about American media, sponsored by David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Joining me on the panel were bestselling author and syndicated columnist Ann Coulter, Jake Tapper from Salon.com, and left-wing British-born journalist Christopher Hitchens.

"I’m a member of the media establishment," Hitchens said half-jokingly, pointing out that he served on the advisory board of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. Tom Brokaw had recently delivered a speech at that school, which Hitchens now recalled for the panel. Hitchens said:

And at the end of his lecture [Brokaw] said that he considers it his job, and he considers his job well done if, at the close of the day, the American people go to bed, go to sleep, thinking that they are in good hands. Now I thought that’s what Tom Brokaw thought his job was, but I was amazed to see him being so candid about it. In other words, here was a man who said the responsibility for consensus, for reassurance rests on my shoulders and it is part of my job to make sure that everyone does feel that pretty much everything is OK. This means that certain disturbing thoughts may not be allowed to arise.

The New Underground focuses precisely on those "disturbing thoughts" that Tom Brokaw prefers not to discuss. For newcomers, visiting our Web sites may feel a bit like walking through Alice’s looking glass. The familiar, innocent world conjured up each evening on our TV screens by Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings gives way to a harsher, more daunting terrain, where Americans face hard choices, as momentous, in their way, as the choices our forefathers confronted in 1776.

This is not familiar terrain to most Americans. But it is the real world—a world that Hillary Clinton and her allies in Big Media do not want us to see.

We Americans have reached a time in our history not unlike that facing England in 1940. It is a time when men and women will be tested, each and every one of us—a time fraught with peril, yet alive with the promise of greatness.

The New Pamphleteers

The Founding Fathers of this country had far more in common with the New Underground than with Tom Brokaw. They were perhaps the most illustrious band of conspiracy mongers in history.

Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and the rest used what we might call conspiracy theories to arouse and mobilize the colonies. They disseminated their conspiracy theories through a highly developed system of covert publishing, comparable in many ways to today’s New Underground.

In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Harvard University historian Bernard Bailyn estimates that more than four hundred pamphlets discussing America’s grievances against the Crown were published in the colonies between 1750 and 1776. Publication continued through the Revolution. By the time the War of Independence ended in 1783, the number of pamphlets had grown to fifteen hundred.

Often published under pseudonyms and circulated by hand from one patriot to the next, these pamphlets constituted a true underground medium. "It was in this form—as pamphlets—that much of the most important and characteristic writing of the American Revolution appeared," writes Bailyn. " . . . the pamphlets are the distinctive literature of the Revolution."

What was in those pamphlets? Conspiracy theories, of course.

The Founding Fathers had a hard time getting Americans to see the big picture. Most colonists did not connect the dots. Here and there, some particular act of King or Parliament might annoy or inconvenience them. But most Americans failed to see any underlying pattern or logic to these events. They failed to see that one bad law led to another, and that sooner or later liberty itself would be snatched away.

The revolutionary pamphleteers helped Americans connect the dots. They helped the average colonist see the greater plan or conspiracy that lay behind such seemingly random and unrelated legislation as the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, the Massachusetts Government Act, the Quartering Act, and so on.

Thomas Jefferson laid out the case for conspiracy succinctly in a 1774 pamphlet. He wrote:

[S]ingle acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day . . . a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.

George Washington agreed. He charged – in a pamphlet co-written with George Mason in 1774 – that the English government had conceived a "regular, systematic plan" for "endeavoring by every piece of art and despotism to fix the shackles of slavery upon us." Samuel Seabury wrote of a "regular plan to enslave America" and Boston patriots, in a series of town resolutions, warned that "a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty… the British constitution seems fast tottering into fatal and inevitable ruin."

These were not the lullabyes of a Tom Brokaw caressing Americans to sleep. They were jarring words of brass and steel clanging in America’s ear. And they served their intended purpose.

In an 1815 letter to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams reflected on the role America’s underground scribblers had played in the Revolution. He wrote:

What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. The records of thirteen legislatures, the pamphlets, newspapers in all the colonies, ought to be consulted during that period to ascertain the steps by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the authority of Parliament over the colonies.

In Adams’s view, it was the writings of the conspiracy theorists—the pamphleteers, that is—more than any acts of the British, that persuaded the colonists to revolt. Foremost among these writings was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published on January 10, 1776. American rebels had fought several battles with the British by the time it was published, but most colonists still hoped for reconciliation with the King.

Unlike Brokaw, Paine did not seek to calm the American people. Instead, he dashed their hopes for peace, calling for a complete break with England. More than 500,000 copies of his rousing polemic were sold, kindling a brushfire of war fever that swept the colonies. It was largely due to Paine’s influence that large numbers of Americans embraced the Declaration of Independence when it was finally issued five months later, on July 4.

The New Underground takes its cue from the pamphleteers of old. It comes not to sweeten our dreams—Tom Brokaw will do that for us—but rather to trouble our sleep with hard truths.

The Spirit of 9-11

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I watched the World Trade Center burn and collapse from a Queens riverbank not far from my house. Afterward, I walked back to my home office and set to work redoing the headlines for FrontPageMagazine.com—the popular Internet news site of which I was then editor.

As I worked, F-16 jet fighters screamed overhead, armed and ready for combat.

It was an extraordinary day by any standard. Many people reacted with shock and disbelief. But while the events of 9-11 were indeed unsettling, something about them also struck me as familiar.

I felt a calm, much like the calm one feels upon entering rough water in a kayak. At such times, though wary of capsizing, an experienced kayaker finds confidence in the sturdiness of his craft and the rigor of his training. So it was on 9-11. I felt as if I had been here before—not in actual fact, but psychologically, in a thousand dress rehearsals of the mind.

Those of us who work in the New Underground do not live as others do. We swim like fish through murky swamps of fear, rumor, intrigue, and disinformation, trying our best to sort through the wild and frightful rumors that fly every day through cyberspace.

As we plow through these reports, a picture forms in our minds of a world more ominous and threatening than the world most people like to imagine. It is a world where nuclear secrets go missing from government labs while bureaucrats turn the other way and pretend not to see; a world where corporate and government whistle-blowers mysteriously commit "suicide" before they have a chance to testify; where plutonium and vials of deadly ebola virus trade on the black market like so many grams of crack It is a world that is never really at peace, but where terror cells, intelligence agencies, global mafias, and shadowy alignments of transnational power brokers jockey constantly for advantage.

It is a tinderbox world that might explode at any moment into ghastly apocalypse. But, for those of us in the New Underground, it is the only world we know.

"Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat"

As I watched the second tower of the World Trade Center fall and pondered the fact that thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of innocent souls had just perished before my eyes, I did not feel, as so many later remarked, that I was watching a Hollywood film.

I knew I was watching real life and real death—an awareness that filled me with quiet and solemn purpose. Now that the apocalypse was upon us, we of the New Underground found ourselves more ready than most to meet it.

During World War II, many Britons marveled at the self-assurance Winston Churchill showed as he took charge of a frightened, ill-prepared nation, teetering on the brink of destruction. "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat," Churchill told the first meeting of his cabinet on May 13, 1940.

Churchill did not bring happy news. But he spoke the truth. For that reason, his speech gave people hope. They had heard enough soothing lies from the appeasers and deniers in government. Now they wanted the lowdown. They sensed in Churchill a man who saw the problem clearly and knew how to deal with it.

All through the 1930s, Churchill had sounded the alarm about the rising war clouds in Europe. But, like the dissident journalists of today’s New Underground, Churchill was mocked and dismissed as an alarmist, a fear-monger, even a lunatic.

When war came, most Britons were caught by surprise. But not Churchill. Year after year, he had lived with the specter of war in his mind. He had breathed its fetid air and felt its oily texture in his dreams. Many have remarked that Churchill seemed to have been born to lead Britain in World War II.

After the fall of France in 1940, Churchill made a speech before Parliament in which he declared:

The disastrous military events which have happened during the past fortnight have not come to me with any sense of surprise. Indeed, I indicated a fortnight ago as clearly as I could to the House that the worst possibilities were open.

Having prepared himself for the worst, Churchill was uniquely equipped to draw from his countrymen their very best. In the same speech, he made history with these words:

Hitler knows that he will have to break us up in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

We Americans have reached a time in our history not unlike that facing England in 1940. It is a time when men and women will be tested, each and every one of us—a time fraught with peril, yet alive with the promise of greatness.

Excerpted from Hillary's Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists by Richard Poe (WND Books / Thomas Nelson 2004). This excerpt may not be reproduced or published, on or offline, except by permission of the publisher.

Copyright © 2004 by Richard Poe. All rights reserved.

 

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[Cicero]

During the clinton years I trusted Jim Robinson to keep my identity secret, and I still prefer to keep it that way, because I agree that this war isn't over yet. And the clintons have never hesitated to blackmail, murder, or otherwise intimidate anyone who gets in their way. No wonder the press plays along. Reporters were fired, corporations were harrassed by regulatory agencies, individuals were investigated by the FBI and the IRS.

900 FBI files was only the tip of the iceberg. I can't belief that hillary left the White House with anything less than a database containing ALL the intelligence on potential enemies, foreign and domestic. And I'm sure that includes newspaper reporters, donors, and businessmen as well as politicians. Anyone who had a file with the FBI, the CIA, or the Defense Intelligence Agency, I presume.

Plus you have to assume that the clintons have several billion dollars salted away in Swiss banks. That's nothing to sneeze at. It's hardly surprising that when they say jump a lot of important people ask, How high?

[WorkingClassFilth]

Ping!

[WorkingClassFilth]

Thanks for the links - and the good work!

[Lancey Howard]

You got to sit on a panel with Ann Coulter?
Man, I gotta take up writing!

Seriously, this is a very good excerpt - - I will be getting the book. Congratulations and best of luck.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[Alamo-Girl]

Kudos! I didn't know you were in there!

[Freedom2specul8]

Hey...what was said about you Luis? That is so exciting!!

[potlatch]

Oh, be still my heart! For a minute I thought Hillary was saying, "I'll get you and your little dog, potlatch"!! LOL

[Luis Gonzalez]

Buy the book!

:-)

[Luis Gonzalez]

Yeppers!

[Quix]

THANKS FOR THIS LONGER VERSION.

I've been wondering . . .

I suspect that you have come across plenty on John Kerry.

Is there any chance that you could get at least a thick pamphlet out on Kerry within enough time to be useful in the campaign?

Thanks for all you do!

[BARLF]

Congrats my friend. Putting my name on the Amazon list, checking it twice!

[skinkinthegrass]

P.S. I'm in chapter 12!

Well, With a credit like that!, Sure :)

[JohnHuang2]

[Victoria Delsoul]

Is Richard Poe related to Edgar Allan Poe?

And yes, I'm going to buy it.

[Alamo-Girl]

Bump!

[ladyinred]

I am so jealous! I don't think I am in this book at all! :-)

[potlatch]

As we plow through these reports, a picture forms in our minds of a world more ominous and threatening than the world most people like to imagine.

I think most of us here at Free Republic feel like that most of the time. We see and read SO much that it seems the whole world is falling apart.

Our forum and the links we read are not made for timid souls. We do it with the hope that we can make a difference, and knowledge is our best friend.

Best of luck on your book, it sounds 'riveting'!

[PJ-Comix]

P.S. I'm in chapter 12!

Which chapter am I in?????

[MeekOneGOP]

haha !